Re-imagining Social Good
On Saturday, 25th Feb, with the help of Zablon Wanyama, we held a 3-hour design thinking workshop focussed on re-imagining social good — a design challenge sponsored by Chagua Charity. The workshop was designed as a light prototype experiment for the Solve4Work Club idea posted for the OpenIDEO Future of Higher Ed challenge.
Highlights from the workshop
- Workshop awareness
Since we had only 4 days to plan for the design workshop, we opted to have fewer attendees with a bias towards participants who already knew about Chagua Charity. So we sent emails to a few students, who are also members of the Chagua Charity community. To bring diversity to the workshop, we also shared the event on Eventbrite where anyone interested in the event would register to attend. We had targeted 20 participants for the event, but we ended up with 9, although 17 had signed up.
2. The workshop approach
Coming to the workshop, we had a set theme for which the design event was to based on, which was; “How might we make giving back to the community easy, fun and impactful for Nairobians?” The first thing we learned was that it was really hard to start generating ideas without participants really understanding why this is a challenge for Chagua Charity. So we took a step backward and decided to focus on re-imagining the giving back process, with the goal of getting participants to come up with different themes under which we can design solutions for in relation to doing social good.
The first step was to get participants to share their experiences on how they have gone about giving back to the community. They were asked to narrate what went well, what was hard and some of the memories they have had over the years. They listed down different ways which they have been involved in giving back and also what ways they have seen their friends use.
The second step was for the participants to dig deeper to their experiences and list some of the challenges they have witnessed in giving back to the community. Participants read out aloud these challenges.
The next step was grouping the listed challenges into high level themes, that captured similar or closely related challenges. During the workshop, we came up with 3 broad themes:
- Logistics and operation
- Communication
- Branding and experience
With 3 themes to focus on, the participants were divided into 3 groups based on their interest on the themes.
With each team focussing on one specific theme, the next step was for teams to create a top level problem statement that highlighted most of the listed challenges within the theme.
Based on the problems statements, the participants then crafted lots of “How might we…” statements. This proved to be the hardest part, considering that the “How Might We..” statement arenot supposed to be too wide nor too narrow. Using 3 dot stickers each, participants were asked to vote for their favorite “How might we..” statements.
With each team having a “How might we…” statement, participants then created their ideal user. With these, participants then were asked to go wild in generated as many ideas as possible that might address the mentioned challenge.
With over 30 ideas generated for each team, members were asked to read aloud their ideas. Some ideas were merged, and newer ideas generated during this phase.
The next step was narrowing down on the ideas. Here participants were given 3 dot stickers to vote for the preferred ideas. With each team having a top idea to work on, the participant’s next task was to create user journey maps for their ideas. It took some bit of time for participants to do this.
After user journey maps, participants were asked to brainstorm different ways in which they can very easily test their ideas.
To end the session, each team selected a group lead, who was to pitch their idea within 3 minutes to the entire room. Members gave their suggestions on the ideas, seeked clarification and provided positive feedback.
On finalizing the workshop, we informed attendees that they have just gone through a design thinking approach to solving a challenge. We asked for feedback, and we were impressed with the comments. One big question for them was, “WHAT NEXT?”
Well, we hope to work with the participants to bring the ideas from the workshop to life. Be sure to check out the album from the event
One of the participants, Enid, gave her thoughts about the day
My Day at Chagua Charity
I got to learn about Chagua Charity from Eventsbrite and signed up for one of their events, Cook4Charity. Though I was not able to make it for this particular event I purposed to attend their future events so that I can find out if Chagua Charity was a good channel for me to give back to the society.
I attended a workshop organized by Chagua Charity of which the main objective of the workshop was to find new ways of giving back to the community in a more exciting manner. I loved the approach used in the workshop and I got to learn so much about design thinking from the workshop. But I had a hard time with the’ mood’ of the meeting. It quite formal and perhaps an outdoor event would be better suited next time.
I will be definitely attending other Chagua Charity meetups as they try to make giving back to the society more pleasant. Personally, I would love to make giving back less cumbersome both to the people making donations and to the organizers of such activities.
